Walls
by wizened cynic
Summary: Four easy steps to redecorating your house. Grace, GraceLuke, mostly Grace.


**Disclaimer:** No, not mine. That's the whole concept of fanfiction, isn't it?

**Notes:** Many thanks to Hope for the beta. I wrote this fic for my own birthday, and it turned out all squishy and het, even though I am assuredly neither squishy nor het.

* * *

The walls of Grace's bedroom are yellow. They used to be white, with a row of pink bunnies carefully stenciled along the top, but when she was about six years old, her parents asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said, "A yellow room." Yellow was her favorite color then, and as somebody about to enter first grade, she considered bunnies to be too juvenile for her taste. (The bunnies were sort of shapeless and faceless, and looked slightly menacing in the moonlight.) 

Her father was quick to say yes, but her mother looked around the room and sighed. "I painted those bunnies the day I found out you were a girl," she said. "Your father told me not to, but I climbed up on that ladder and painted every single one of them by hand." Even at six, Grace knew that her mother was guilt-tripping her. Jews could smell guilt the way sharks smell blood in the water.

She stood her ground and insisted that she wanted a yellow room, and when her mother finally relented to hiring a decorator, Grace told her that she wanted to paint the walls herself.

"Oh, sweetie," her mother crooned, "are you sure that's what you want?"

"I'm sure," Grace said.

Grace's mother mentioned the words "get a professional" at least twice before she finally gave up, and the three of them went to Home Depot one afternoon to pick out the paint. Grace chose one with a name she liked: dandelion. A kind of flower you can make a wish with.

They spent all weekend painting, Grace's father lifting her up to reach corners of the ceiling, Grace's mother finally joining in despite the mess and the toxic smell of paint (Grace _liked_ it). All of them ended up with yellow on their clothes, yellow in their hair, but Grace's mom didn't say anything, not even once, and when they were finished, they were quite pleased with themselves. "I'd say we did a mighty fine job," Grace's father said.

"See, we don't need no decorator," Grace said to her mom, who retaliated by smearing a daub of paint on Grace's cheek. Then she went down to bake a celebratory cake while Grace and her father finished the trim.

It was a good weekend, one of the last good ones.

Grace grew out of the yellow by the time she was ten or eleven. Her favorite color was black, if black counted as a color. She learned in school that it doesn't. It's the lack of everything else.

She thought briefly about painting over her walls again. Maybe she'd even hire a decorator this time, if it made her mother happy. Not that anything made her mother happy these days, unless it came out of a bottle and was served on the rocks. Her father was too busy, her mother too ill, so another weekend of collaborative painting was out of the question.

So she kept the yellow, covered it with posters and stickers and various signs she lifted from neighborhood buildings. It seems incongruous to who she is now, and sometimes she feels like she's trapped in the room belonging to a person she no longer remembers. Sometimes she dreams of the smell of turpentine, the feel of paint drying on her skin.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The walls of Grace's college dorm room are hospital-white, probably because the fascists in charge want to remind the students that this is an _institute_ for _learning_, not a giant daycare facility for budding alcoholics and drug addicts.

On her side of the room, Grace's roommate has put up posters of animals and inspirational sayings. Kittens in a basket, a puppy hugging a raccoon, and the most heinous one, an orangutan grinning like a Halloween pumpkin, advertising the concept of not crying because it's over, smile because it happened. Grace finds that to be an overused and clichéd saying, and besides, what the hell has the orangutan got to smile about? Being hounded by poachers and zoo animal-recruiters? Having its natural habitat chopped down to make space for factories?

The walls on Grace's side of the room are almost bare. She'd thought about taking the posters off her bedroom wall and relocating them here, but in the end she decided against it. She left them on the walls of her room, maybe as a way of telling her father that she would come back, just in case he was worried that she'd stay the hell away from Arcadia at the first chance she got. (Which, to be honest, she'd considered once, a long time ago.) It has proved to be a good idea, because Grace is pretty sure Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara deserve better than to spend their days staring at an overenthusiastic monkey.

Joan forgoes college to embark on a cross-continental road trip. Grace has no idea what Joan is doing. Saving people from themselves, probably. Joan is good at that. Joan sends postcards every two weeks or so, scribbling illegibly in pen, pencil, and what Grace truly hopes is not soy sauce. Maine, Arkansas, Colorado, Nevada. Grace tapes them to the wall, charting Joan's journey through a row of postcards.

Luke sends a postcard when he visits MIT. It's ridiculous, because MIT is only two hours away from Grace's college.

Grace puts it on her wall anyway.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For a while, Grace lives in the attic of a crumbling brownstone house. The rent is reasonable and the landlady is amiable enough; the only drawback is that the amiable landlady, who hails from Kazakhstan, doesn't believe in indoor heating. She doesn't allow Grace to have a space heater either, for fear of her house burning down, and after several weeks of waking up in subzero weather, Grace begins to wonder if the landlady is trying to freeze her out.

Luke visits, but doesn't stay over --- Grace doesn't blame him. Who wants to wake up with icicles hanging over their head and frostbite on their last three toes? Once, when Grace comes out of the shower, she finds Luke curled up in her bed, which is as about as warm and comfortable as a tombstone in January.

"What the hell are you doing?" she asks, and he replies, "Warming your bed up for you."

She would have given him a longer and harder look, but hypothermia beckons. "That is a little creepy but mostly appreciated," she says, and crawls into bed beside him. They lie side by side for a long time, not speaking. Finally, Luke asks, "What _is_ that on your wallpaper?"

"I have no idea." Grace has long given up on trying to find out. "Man-eating flowers, maybe."

"Now I'm profoundly disturbed. You should move."

"I should."

One of the man-eating flowers winks at her.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Grace categorically refuses to let Luke paint their bedroom tangerine, he tries to convince her that kiwi will be a reasonable choice. "Okay, what's with the fruit names?" she asks. "Is there supposed to be a theme or something? Paint made by the California Farmers' Association?"

"The colors you like depress me to death."

"Blue is not depressing."

"_That_ shade of blue is. It's the color of a bruise. It's the color of Eeyore. Grace, I will _not_ have the walls of my bedroom the same color as a cartoon donkey."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Disney completely destroyed A. A. Milne's books and commercialized his creative vision."

"Nice try, rocket scientist. I'm keeping the blue."

Grace paints two of the walls a purplish-blue, and Luke paints two of them green (Grace refuses to say kiwi), and the remaining half-wall --- there is a remaining half-wall because Luke lives in an apartment designed by architecture school dropouts --- is a lighter blue, a compromise of sorts. The guy at Benjamin Moore's gives them a strange look when they buy their paint and explain that, yes, it's for the same room.

The overall effect is not too bad, and it's fun to confuse people when they ask what color the room is. "Blue," Grace would say, just as Luke answers, "Green," and sometimes, even after they've explained, they are met with glances that say, "That's just weird."

It isn't, really. Grace likes the idea of having a room that isn't conventional, a non-conformist room that isn't what most people expect. She likes that she and Luke are sharing such a room, since what they have isn't what most people expect either.

On one of the dark blue walls, there's a framed copy of the blueprint for the rail gun; on a green wall, a picture of her Bat Mitzvah, which embarrasses her a little but also makes her smile. There's a fingernail scratch in the middle of the light blue wall, a tiny streak of white that isn't noticeable unless you look really hard. Neither of them know how it got there, and neither of them care.

Their room isn't perfect, Grace thinks, and neither are they. So that's all right.


End file.
